Eggs baked in garlic rice

My second wild garlic dish of this spring is a variation of a dish I've previously made with spinach. It's got plenty of big flavours, so the punchy wild garlic works a treat. But not to worry if you don't have wild garlic - just use spinach plus a few garlic cloves.

It's not necessarily the most beautiful dish, but the taste more than makes up for it - good cheesy, starchy comfort food with all the loveliness of a runny egg yolk. And it's even pretty healthy. As long as you use a full-flavoured cheese, this dish makes a small piece of cheese go a long way.

Spiced lentils, kohlrabi and wild garlic

Hurray for wild garlic season again. It's with us for just a few short weeks (during which time I am quite likely to smell of garlic). Then it's gone for another year, to be followed by the British asparagus season, and I'll know that summer really is on the way.

It took me less than five minutes to gather half a carrier bag full of wild garlic in the Surrey hills last week. Some of it made its way onto a mushroom, garlic and ricotta pizza - one of my perennial favourites. The rest went into this dish of spiced lentils. A curry or something similar really is one of the best ways to use wild garlic. This is not a subtle ingredient, so it can really stand up to strong spices, as well as taking the place of the garlic you would probably be putting in your curry anyway.

Root vegetable tagine

Root vegetables might not be the most exciting things to have in the fridge, but with a bit of encouragement they can be as delicious as the most exotic ingredients. I like to roast them to bring out the sweetness, then add layers of flavour with spices, herbs and harissa paste.

The word tagine has come to apply to a wide variety of dishes, as long as they're looked in one pot, with vaguely Moroccan flavours and generally some dried fruit in the mix. Traditionally, of course, the word applies to the cooking pot itself. But for this dish any roasting tin with a couple of inches of depth will do just fine.